Top 10 Cycling Cities
Cycling Without Fear
In this article, Dan Kois tells his story of living in the Netherlands for 3 months with his children but without a car.
In the Netherlands, only tourists wear helmets.
a country with more bikes than people, and we were eager to slip into the two-wheeled flow.
Even in optimistic American municipalities that have demarcated bike lanes on the street or paved a few bike paths, cars come first, and drivers rarely look out for cyclists. Drivers park and then swing their front doors wide; they make right turns without looking behind them; they pull out of parking lots and cut across bike lanes at full speed. Who can blame them? The system was built to maximize drivers’ efficiency, and anything that might slow them down is a glitch. [underlining, mine]
For cyclists used to being second-class citizens, watching bikes navigate the Netherlands is revelatory.
Most important, drivers look out for cyclists, cede the right of way, and are rarely surprised by them. After all, nearly all those drivers are cyclists themselves. The eighteen million residents of the … more than twenty-two million bicycles. Dutch kids ride in child seats practically from birth, are on balance bikes by two, and are cycling unaided by four. Old people continue to cycle, too: when pedalling gets too difficult, they switch to battery-assisted e-bikes, which now outsell standard adult bikes in the Netherlands.
Dan Kois, How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman, The New Yorker, September 13, 2019
Climate Apocalypse
September 8, 2019
I just finished reading What If We Stopped Pretending? by Jonathan Frazen in the September 8, 2019 issue of The New Yorker. I think you should read it too.
Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter.
To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong.
Jonathan Frazen
USDA Racist?
Designing for Desire Lines
Is Sharing Caring?
Mammoth Lakes Library
I recently read The Public Library, an amazing book written by Robert Dawson. Dawson, traveled and took pictures of libraries around the world. He made an effort to photography libraries that were in affluent and struggling communities. I love books about books, but this one was such a fantastic idea and so easy to execute myself.
While on a recent vacation to Mammoth in the mountains of California. I convinced my wife to stop by the local library to take some pictures and explore. It didn’t take long and it was a beautiful library. The library was opened in 2007. I also felt much more a part of the community sharing in their local library.
The two-story library looked new and was beautiful inside, with lots of movies and audiobooks on the first floor as well as a young readers section. On the second floor, we found the children’s area a MakerSpace and the rest of the collection. A very good size for a small town.
Next time you are on vacation make a quick stop at the local library. You might just learn something. I’ll make an effort to do more spotlights on libraries as I am able to. This was fun for me and I hope it gave you all something fun to read and maybe encourages you to visit a library soon!